The present invention relates to machines for shredding or cutting vehicle tires and various other types of materials. Such shredding machines have been utilized in shredding waste materials which are to be disposed.
Disposal of waste materials is becoming increasingly more difficult and expensive. Waste disposal sites throughout the United States are quickly becoming filled to capacity, and the lack of adequate waste disposal capacity is reaching crisis proportions. Many states must ship their waste materials to other states for disposal and some states have banned certain materials from being dumped in their remaining landfill sites. As the remaining capacity of waste disposal sites decreases, the cost of disposing of waste materials will continue to become more expensive. The cost of shipping waste materials is also expensive and increases the total cost of waste disposal.
It has therefore been found desirable to dispose of waste materials in a volume efficient manner. Shredding of waste materials, especially bulky materials, into small pieces or pellets allows the pellets to be densely packed together into a significantly smaller volume than that occupied by the unshredded material. The shredded material will then occupy a smaller portion of the remaining disposal site space and will require a fewer number of truck loads to haul the shredded material to the disposal site.
Certain types of waste, such as vehicle tires, are extremely difficult and expensive to dispose of. Large unsightly tire dumps have arisen which store tires above ground as there is no economically feasible method of disposing of tires. Vehicle tires however may be changed from a commodity which is difficult and expensive to dispose of, to a commodity with a commercial value. Rather than disposing of tires in a dump, these tires may be shredded into pellets which may be utilized as a fuel source by utility companies. The shredded tire pellets however must be uniformly sized and of a sufficiently small size to be useable as a fuel. A shredded tire will occupy approximately one-sixth or one-seventh the volume of an unshredded tire. Therefore, six truck loads of unshredded tires may be transported as one truck load of shredded tires. Machines which have been used to reduce the volume of materials are shown in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,931,935 and 4,691,871. These machines do not cut tires into uniformly sized small pellets which are capable of being sold and utilized as a fuel source.